Nasa Works To Prevent Gridlock In The Sky

May 31, 2004|By DAVE SCHLECK, dschleck@dailypress.com | 247-7430

HAMPTON — With air traffic increasing, NASA Langley is developing new tools to help pilots choose their own flight paths.

When you're trying to catch some z's on your business flight, air traffic controllers on the ground are busy directing your craft to a safe landing. But there are only about 15,200 air traffic controllers guiding about 87,000 flights a day in the United States.

NASA Langley Research Center is trying to lighten the load on controllers by giving pilots more tools to make flight decisions. The proposed "Autonomous Operations Planner" helps pilots plot their own routes without interfering with neighboring planes or tangling traffic near the airport.

Currently, cockpit computer displays show where the aircraft is going and the general location of other nearby planes. NASA's Autonomous Operations Planner plugs into existing flight management systems on the plane. The cockpit display shows more planes near the piloted craft and indicates which direction they're heading.

When a plane is on anything close to a collision course with another aircraft, the software works through hundreds of possible flight scenarios, advises the pilot on how to resolve the problem and displays alternate flight paths.

"There's a lot more information available to me," said Rick Shay, a 767 pilot who is a paid consultant for NASA.

Something has to be done to prevent gridlock in the sky, Langley researchers say. Airline business has rebounded since the slump created by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Air traffic is expected to grow by as much as 70 percent by 2015, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We don't think, with how the current system is designed, that it is going to handle the future need," said Richard Barhydt, Langley aerospace engineer.

Since 1997, NASA has spent about $55 million on autonomous flight-management research, striving to triple the capacity of the nation's airspace system without increasing the ratio of catastrophic air accidents.

But the technology raises several questions: Will it make air traffic controllers obsolete? Who will ultimately be in control of a plane's flight path -- the pilot, the autonomous management system or the air traffic controller? Will there be enough research funding to make NASA's technology standard for commercial airliners?

The answer to the first question is no, said David Wing, senior research engineer at Langley.

"This is not like an air traffic controller in the sky," Wing said. "The pilot has other tasks."

Still, NASA engineers hope that by helping pilots pick their own flight path, they can give air traffic controllers more time to focus on overall traffic management.

As for who is in control, FAA regulations state that pilots are ultimately responsible for where the plane goes. Barhydt stressed that the autonomous flight-management system does not steer the plane; the pilot does.

"The concept is completely human-centered," he said.

NASA is testing the concept in laboratories at Langley and at Ames Research Center in California. During a simulation this summer, one lab will be for air traffic controllers who observe and manage the trajectories of a mix of fictional planes -- some with the NASA technology and some without. Pilots in another room will use the technology to maneuver their "planes" around a simulation of the airspace near the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.

The current phase of research ends in September. NASA has approved future research, but there's no schedule yet for testing the technology in real flight. NASA is thinking of the technology as an addition to the next generation of aircraft.

Tom Graff, a pilot consultant for NASA, said the simulations have been promising.

"It enabled me to get the aircraft to where I wanted to go more efficiently," he said.

What do folks outside of the project think?

John Mazur is spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association, a union representing 64,000 pilots who work for 42 airlines. "It would be an improvement to the system we already had," he said.

"All this new technology has to be designed with a lot of very careful human factors and considerations," he said. "You can't just take something that an engineer thinks is neat off the drawing board and put it on an airplane without looking at how it's going to be used and how the pilot is going to interface with the technology."

Barhydt said NASA has that covered. "Many of our researchers specialize in human factors engineers and are themselves pilots," he said. *